Catholicism in the Middle Ages

WHAT do we understand by Civilization? It is usually taken to mean the
refinement of man in his social capacity. Whatever uplifts, cleanses,
purifies, inspires man as a member of the common human family is held
by all men to be civilizing. The word, if not the idea, comes to us
from the masterful Roman people. They believed that their
civilitas, or civilization, the sum total and the spirit of
social progress attained in their city by their laws and language,
their religion and philosophy of life, was unsurpassed, was the last
and highest effort of mankind.

In this they erred; and we need no better proof than the remnants of
their life that have come down to us in one way or another. But they
erred in noble company, for before them the Egyptian, the Assyrian, and
the Persian had shared the same conviction, as they have left the same
historical proofs of their self-illusion in many a great monument, many
a proud inscription. Even the Greek, whose civilization is so
intimately related to that of the Romans, and through
them to us, was unable to protect and propagate directly the spirit and
the institutions of his own admirable refinement. In all purely human
work there is a response of death, a certain futility and emptiness, as
a reminder by Nature of man's transitory character and functions.

Nevertheless, while the forms, the outer dress, as it were, of
civilization, change from one epoch of time to another, there is
forever common to all mankind an irrepressible trend, like a rising
flame or a flowing current, that impels us to create and share common
interests and common enjoyments, that calls forth common efforts for
causes that are common and therefore higher than any or all of us. In
the common gains or attainments we bring to the front the best and
noblest that is in each one of us. In the common struggle we learn to
admire and love the natural forces, gifts, opportunities, and
institutions which have been the means of creating what each race, or
people, or epoch calls its civilization. So the flag of one's
fatherland arouses the holiest of natural passions, for it compresses
into one cry, as it were, the whole life of a great and ancient people
through many stirring centuries. So the tattered colors of the regiment
whip the blood of the soldier into a rapid flow, for they nation, not to the pity or needs of rude
and fierce conquerors, but to the influence and authority of the
Catholic Church. Roughly speaking, we may say that the Middle Ages are
that period of one thousand years that opens with the overthrow of the
imperial power of Rome in Central and Southern Europe about the year
500 A.D. and closes with the discovery of America and the invention of
printing, just before the year 1500. In that time, there is, in greater
or lesser degree, one form of government, the feudal system, based on
permanent warfare, upheld by a monopoly of the land, and the weakness
of the central authority in every State. One race, the Teutonic,
imposes its will on all the fair lands that were once the provinces of
Rome -- Spain, Gaul, Britain, Helvetia, the Rhineland, Italy herself.
Throughout Europe the warrior rules, and the public life is marked by
all the virtues and vices of the camp or burg. With few exceptions, the
civil power is held by an aristocracy, more or less open from below,
more or less restrained by king or emperor, but always violent and
proud. The habits and manners of daily life are yet largely those of
the forest and the marsh and the sea whence the invaders came. It was
many a long day before the English thane forgot that he was the son of Low Dutch pirates, or the Norman earl ceased to feel
himself the descendant of men who had made a dozen kings to quake and
emperors to do them homage. The Hidalgos of Spain, the Ritters of
Germany, are long conscious that they hold their places by reason of
the old Gothic and Suevic or Alemannic conquests. At the basis of this
society there is always the antithesis of might and right, the strong
and the weak, the brutal and ignorant against the refined and educated,
the selfish and individual greed or need against the purposes and
utilities of progressive society. When we look out over these ten
centuries of human history, they come before us like the meeting of the
turbulent sea with the waters of some majestic river, the Ganges or the
Mississippi. On one side is the contribution of an orderly and
regulated force, on the other the lawless impact of an elemental
strength. The result is eddies and currents, islands and bars, reefs
and shoals. A new and strange life develops along this margin of
conflict between order and anarchy. All is shifting and changing, and
yet, beneath all the new phenomena, goes on forever the original
struggle between the river that personifies civilization and the sea
that personifies the utter absence of the same. So it
was in the civil and secular world of the Middle Ages. There were
indeed periods of advancement, stretches of sunshine in a gloomy and
troubled climate, individuals and institutions of exceptional goodness.
If the underlying barbarism of the civil life had its vices, it had
also its virtues, that both pagan and Christian have agreed in
praising. It had overrun Europe like a flood, but it brought with it a
rich alluvial deposit of courage and ambition, the elasticity and ardor
of youth, fresh and untainted hearts, an eagerness to know and to do,
an astounding energy that was painful to the sybaritic society that
suffered the domination of barbarism.

For an event of so great magnitude, it is wonderful how little we know
of the circumstances of the fall of the Roman authority in the West.
The civilization that up to the end was heir to all the art and
philosophy of Greece, all the power and majesty of Rome, suffered
shipwreck almost without a historian. Odds and ends of annals and
chronicles, stray remarks apropos of other things -- these are all that
are left to us of those memorable decades of the fifth century, when
Rome saw her gates desecrated by one barbarian horde after another. Yet
enough remains to show that it was the Catholic Church
which stood between her and utter extirpation, so great was the
contempt and hatred of Goth and Vandal and Hun for the city that had
been long the oppressor of the nations. Here a bishop turns away the
wandering hordes from his town, there another encourages to vigorous
resistance that is successful; here a holy virgin saves Paris from
destruction, there an Italian bishop brings home a long procession of
captives. Everywhere in this dark century that saw the old classic life
enter on its decline, the Catholic bishop appears as the defender of
the municipality and the people against every oppression. He also
possesses a moral authority equally great with Roman and barbarian.
Alone he is trusted by both powers, for he is the only social force
left that is really unaffected by the collapse of the old world and the
arrival of a new one. The bishop is the ambassador of emperor and
people, as on that dread day in the middle of the century, when Leo the
Great went out to Attila, on his way to Rome, and persuaded the great
Hun to turn back with his half million savages and spare the Eternal
City. As sorrow upon sorrow fell on the doomed cities and populations,
the civil power gave way completely, and the ministers of religion were
compelled to take up a work foreign to their calling,
and save such wreckage as they might of the administration, art, and
literature of their common fatherland. They became the premiers of the
barbarian kings, the codifiers of their laws, their factotums in all
things, their intimate friends and counsellors. There is not a state in
Europe, and all of them go back to thus time, that does not recognize
among its real founders, the Catholic bishop before whom the original
conquerors bowed. There is Clovis before Remigius, Theodoric before
Epiphanius and Cassiodorus, the Burgundian king before Avitus, and so
many others that it is needless to detail their names or deeds. I
recall the facts only to show that the very bases of our Christian
society, the very foundations of mediaeval Christendom, were laid by a
long line of brave and prophetic bishops and priests, who saw at once
in the barbarian conquerors future children of the Church and apostles
of Christianity. On the very threshold, therefore, of the Middle Ages,
the Catholic Church appears as the truest friend both of the old order
that was going out, and the new one that was being ushered in amid the
unspeakable horrors that always accompany the downfall of an ancient
and highly wrought civilization.

II.

All civilization begins with the soil. What have been the relations of
the Catholic Church to the soil throughout the Middle Ages? Everywhere
man is a child of the soil. Mysteriously he issues from it. He lives on
it and by it. He goes down one day to his appointed place in the mighty
bosom of Mother Earth. No matter how complicated society may become, it
is impossible that conditions should arise in which man can be
otherwise than dependent upon the earth that God gave him for a
sufficient and suitable sojourning lace. Institutions, laws, customs,
and marners that sin against the God-given relations of man and the
Eoil bear in them always the sure promise of death. Half, nay, nearly
all the great events of history are directly traceable to the struggles
for the soil, whether from within or without the State. The plebeians
and the patricians of Rome create immortal principles of private law by
reason of this very confict; the Roman State itself goes on the rocks
because it neglected good lessons learned in its infancy. The contests
of warlike shepherds in China precipitate masses of barbarian Goths and
Huns and Vandals on the Roman Empire and dislocate the
social fabric that the genius and fortune and experience of a thousand
years had built up. For another thousand years of feudal life the land
is the only source and sign of wealth. The Middle Ages, economically,
are that period of Western history when a few reaped the products of
the earth, when the many bore the burden of the sowing, but at the
reaping went empty-handed away.

The Catholic Church is too much the Mother Church of the poor and lowly
and humble, too much the Spouse of the carpenter's Son, that great
Friend of all who labor and are heavy burdened, not to hear forever in
her heart the tender yet puissant cry, "I have pity on the multitude."
The life of the soil is really in the labor that makes it bear fruit.
Until man appeared the world was indeed a bright garden, but growing
wild and untrimmed, all its powers sleeping as though under a spell
within its bosom. This labor the Catholic Church has always sanctified
and held up as a necessary and a blessed thing. Her Founder was
accounted the son of a common laboring man, Himself a toiler at the
bench. Her first missionaries were working-men -- fishermen, publicans, a physician, a tent-maker. She, first and alone,
uplifted on her banner the symbols of labor and declared them worthy
and holy. All her early documents bear the praise of labor. All her
earliest legislation enforces labor as a duty for all. But the duty of
labor brings with it a corresponding right to the fruit and reward of
labor, and here she came at once into contact with the existing
conditions of society.

I shall say nothing of the relations of the Church to the soil under
the pagan Roman Empire. Those three centuries were not unlike the three
decades of the hidden life of Jesus, an epoch of divine education for
her public life. But as soon as she is free we find her concerned about
the treatment of the working-man in the great ranches or villas of the
Roman nobles. No more underground prisons, no more stamping with hot
irons the face that has been cleansed in the baptism of Christ, no more
compelling of girls to go on the obscene vaudeville stage of antiquity,
no more maiming or abusing of the slave. She opens vast refuges in
every city for the poor and homeless driven off their estates by the
growing monopoly in land. Every church door is a distributing place for the bread of the ensuing week. One quarter of the
funds of every church goes to the relief of her poor. Before the empire
fell one of her priests arose and wrote an immortal page that stands
forever to show that it was the abuse of taxation that brought it low
and not the right hand of the barbarian, which in more humane days she
had always beaten down. Economically, the old Roman Empire was always
pagan, even in the hands of Christian men. Its principles and methods
of administration never changed. It was an omnipotent, omniscient
bureaucracy, that learned nothing and forgot nothing, until one grim
day the Cross went down before the Crescent on the dome of St. Sophia
and the Leather Apron was hoisted above the waters of the Golden Horn.
But in all those trying ages, every bishop's house was a court of
appeal for the overburdened peasant, and the despotic lord or cunning
middleman was very likely to hear in a summary way from Constantinople,
or from the barbarian kings turned Christian. A bishop sat on the bench
with the judges. He visited the prisons, his church had the right of
asylum for poor debtors or oppressed men generally. He was recognized
by the State as a natural-born spokesman of the people
in city and country. He was the last link between the old Roman society
and the new world arising on its ruins. In his person, for he was
nearly always the ablest man in the city, were gathered all the best
traditions of law and procedure, of traditions and good customs. In the
wreckage of the State he had saved, as it were, the papers, the family
records, the registers, and the like, that in an hour of peace would
enable order to be brought out of chaos by younger hands. Let any
modern economist or lawyer read the letters of Gregory the Great and he
will be astonished to see how this great Roman nobleman, who traced his
ancestry back to the Caesars, and who had been himself governor of Rome
at the end of the sixth century, treats the relations of the peasant
and the soil. Without interfering with the theories of the day that did
not concern him, he upholds in a long series of documents the just
rights of his tenants on the four hundred farms that the Roman Church
then owned in Sicily. He chides his agents for rackrenting and orders
the excess to be given back. He provides for an adjustment of losses
between the Church and the tenants. He writes to the emperor about
false measurements and exactions. Were all the noble
principles he promulgates to be put into modern English, it would be
seen that this ancient Bishop of Rome had asserted thirteen hundred
years ago, at the beginning of our modern world, the principles that
are yet basic in any society of men that pretends to stand and work
well, without convulsions or revolutions. Now, Gregory was only the
head of the system; he was not the inventor of those principles. He
recalls them to his Italian bishops as being the purest spirit of the
gospel. If we want to know what they are we have only to read the
magnificent encyclical of Leo XIII. on the condition of the working-
men. In it these principles are clothed in language scarcely different
from that of his ancient predecessor.

These ancient bishops of the decadent empire and the incipient States
of Europe compelled the great land-owners to build numerous little
chapels on their estates. Thus arose around the homes of religion the
little villages of France and Italy and Germany. It is no mere chance
that causes the Catholic Church spire in these lands to rise from ten
thousand hamlets. The hamlets grew up beneath its beneficent shadow. In
those little chapels were told to the noble and serf the
truths of the gospel that gradually broke down the mediaeval servage.
Before those little rural altars the gospel was first divided into
sections as we read it to-day on Sundays. Then again yearly the bishops
in synod taught the parish priests how to comment on it, how to apply
it without fear of cringing. To-day it seems a small task to speak the
truth before all, but one day, long ago, it required an abnormal moral
courage for the son of a peasant to stand up before the owner of the
great warlike castle on yonder peak and bid him cease from vexing, bid
him live with one wife, bid him stop the rioting and dissipation by
which he spent in one night the earnings of the estate for a year.
Behind that poor semi-illiterate hind, dressed in the garments of a
priest, there stood the bishop, and behind the bishop rose the powerful
figure of the Church incarnate in the supreme Bishop at Rome. Countless
times the thunderbolt flew from thence, straight and true, that laid
low the awful pride and the satanic tenacity of some great Frank or
some fierce Lombard lord. It was indeed the Catholic bishop who saved
the peasants of Europe from the fifth to the eighth century. For three
hundred years he was the last court of appeal; he was
the gospel walking among men; he was the only international force with
power to execute its decrees. His cathedral was always in the heart of
the city, and in its great doorway he sat regularly to judge justly and
without price. His priests were usually the lawyers and notaries of the
people. And on certain old Romanesque or Byzantine portals you may yet
see in marble that lovely scene of the episcopal weekly tribunal.
Around his house and in front of his church stretched the public
square. He was the protection, therefore, of the little tradesman, the
peasant, the pedler with his wares. To him came the pilgrim, the
stranger, the wandering penitent. To him the ambassadors going east and
west, the king on his annual round, the great nobles charged with the
administration of justice or the collection of revenue. And when, after
Pentecost, for example, or at Michaelmas, he gathered in annual synod
his clergy from the villages and ranches and villas and castles, and
stood at his throne, mitre on head and staff in hand, it did seem to
all the assembled multitude, and it was in its own way true, that the
Sun of Justice was shining among men, that every wrong would be
redressed and every sorrow smoothed over, so far as it
lay in the public power to do so. It is not for nothing that the
Catholic episcopate won its incredible authority over the people. Such
historical phenomena have always an adequate cause. Right here it was
three long centuries of intelligent and sympathetic protection of the
people, at a time when the feudal law was a-forming and the benefit of
Roman law was in abeyance.

All this time the old conditions of the Roman provinces of Europe were
being deeply modified. Industry had been extinguished and commerce
paralyzed by the first inroads of the barbarians. The east fell away
from the west, whose jealous kings tolerated little intercourse with
Constantinople. The loveliest lands of France and Italy went without
culture, and soon forests grew where palaces had lifted their proud
fronts. The wild beasts wandered among the baths and porticoes and
temples of the ancients, and the very names of towns that were once
echoed beyond the Ganges were forgotten. Then arose another mighty
force of the Catholic Church, the monks of St. Benedict. Long while
only laymen, subject to the local bishop and controlled by him, they
grew very numerous in time. Their rule was an admirable thing for the social needs of the day. It inculcated equally the labor
of the field and the labor of the brain, and so during this period and
long after, all Europe was overrun by the children of that good man
whose mortal remains repose above the rushing Anio amid the sublime
scenery of Subiaco. The Roman Bishop took them under his especial
protection, and together they formed a religious power that worked for
good in every direction without any thought of self-advancement or any
conflict of an unavoidable character. They chose usually for a home the
waste and desert spots of Europe. Soon the forest was again thinned out
and crops were again planted. Priest and brother, the educated man and
the common laborer, went down into the field together, and worked all
day in silence side by side. They built the ditches, they bridged the
streams, they laid the necessary roads; they increased the area of
arable land in every decade, and thereby drove out the noxious wild
beasts; draining and irrigation on a large scale were carried on by
them. Walls and fences and grauges arose on every little estate that
they had created out of nothing. The peasant, half barbarian, learned
from them the traditions of old Roman agriculture, for astery. These, too, became
proprietors, and on their estates the peasantry could see other
principles of government than those of the rapacious feudal lord. It
was an old saying in the Middle Ages that it was a good thing to dwell
beneath the crozier. As a fact, the greenest fields and the richest
slopes, the best vineyards, the best kept forests and fisheries, were
those of bishop or abbot. Here religion forbade waste and riot, and
education brought to their cultivation much knowledge handed down from
the ancients. Though without wives and children, these great
ecclesiastical lords, always elective, held a kind of a dead-hand over
their estates. Thus were secured perpetuity of tenure, continuous
culture of the fields, equality of rents, new tracts of reclaimed
lands, mildness of administration, and a minimum of expense in the
conduct of vast properties. The classical studies broadened their views
and humanized bishop and priest and monk. The meditation on the gospel,
the example of countless holy monks and hermits, the daily service of
God at the majestic altars of some basilica or Romanesque church
softened their hearts. Those men and women whom the bishop or the abbot
daily blessed, who brought in their woes with their
tithes, were his tenants, perhaps for many generations; thus there
arose a certain fraternal intimacy between the most powerful men in the
State and the humblest serf who delved on the hillside or tended sheep
along the uplands. Whole sections of Europe were in this way reclaimed,
or for the first time cultivated. Prussia, Southern Germany, most of
the Rhineland, the greater part of Switzerland, great tracts of
Southern Italy and Sicily, of Norway and Sweden, are the immediate
creation of these churchmen. If we would have some idea of the duties
of a mediaeval bishop we should have to compare him with the president
of some great railroad and double that with many of the duties of the
mayor of a city and add thereto the responsibilities of teacher and
preacher.

III.

The States of the Middle Ages were almost purely agricultural. Yet even
in such States problems of production and distribution arose. The
population increased, wants multiplied, war and travel and awakening
knowledge roused curiosity and desire. The bishop's house first, and
then the monastery, was the great nucleus of social life
in the Middle Ages. Around the cathedral that the bishop built, perhaps
in some lonely spot, if he was a missionary, or on the site of the old
public buildings, if he dwelt in a once Roman town, gathered all kinds
of workmen -- tillers of the field, the weavers of cloth, the builders
of houses, the decorators of the cathedral, the workers in linen and
embroidery. Here were to be found the stone mason, the blacksmith, the
joiner, the carpenter, the gold and silversmith, every artificer,
indeed, for the little community. We see at once that all the germs of
a city life are here. Indeed, this is the origin of a multitude of
European cities. The day will come when fierce conflict will arise
between the bishops and the serfs emancipated and enriched, the latter
claiming corporate cognition and a municipal constitution, freedom from
imposts, and the like; the former pointing to the fact that all they
had was a benefit of the Church. There are some kinds of justice so
complicated that time alone can grant them. And so in the end the
bishop lost his control and the cities won legal recognition.
Similarly, the monasteries were centres of consumption and
distribution. The revival of the cloth trade in England in the twelfth
century owes very much to the consumption of black and
gray cloth by the monks and the nuns, and, indeed, was long in their
hands. The preservation and protection of the culture of the grape, the
viniculture of the Middle Ages, was almost entirely dependent on the
immense multitude of churches, chapels, and altars. The minor arts,
like delicate work in silver and gold, in ivory and wood, embroideries
and tapestries, were kept alive by the constant need of new church
furniture.

In those days men lived much alone in castles or widely scattered
hamlets. The annual fair with its products from all parts of the world
was held under church auspices, about the monastery or in front of the
cathedral. The wares of east and west were there hawked about; the
traveller and the pilgrim hurried thither; the legal needs of the
peasants -- wills, marriages, contracts -- were attended to; distant
relatives met one another; all the refining duties of hospitality were
exercised. And above it all arose the holy and benignant figure of
Mother Church. The fair was opened with all the solemnities of the
liturgy, and the fair itself was known as "The Mass” of St. Michael,
e.g., or of Our Lady. Indeed, the great book-fair of Leipzig is
still called "The Mass of the Books."

Thus, throughout those remote times both the monastery
preserved the germs of them would have utterly general ignorance and
barbarism of the lay life. It is to them that we owe directly the
preservation of all the social arts and professions. how many reflect
when they enter an apothecary shop that it is the outcome of the
"infirmary" of the monastery where the simples and drugs were kept that
were needed for the use of the inmates or the serfs, and later on the
peasants of the abbey. The monks copied out the old medical
manuscripts, treasured up and applied much homely domestic traditions
of a better day, and, to say the least, were as useful in handing down
Greek medical practice as the Arabs were in transmitting its theory.
Every monastery had its brother devoted to the sick, whose practical
skill was often very great. While in Italy, both north and south, there
surely lingered no little scientific medicine of the past, in the west
of Europe the monks were, to a very great extent, the generous
physicians of the rude and uncultured populations; memories of those
days still hang about the cloisters of Italy, and those who have lived
there long remember how often a rude dentistry is
gratuitously practised by some good Capuchin, how often the fever-
stricken boy of the Campagna throws himself at the entrance of the
first cloister, how the women of the hamlet get from the nuns of the
neighborhood the simple remedies they need. When we pass by some
brilliantly lighted window and see exposed Chartreuse, Benedictine, and
the like, we may remember that these sweetened liqueurs are antique
recipes of mediaeval monks, originally meant for uses of health.
Convents still exist out of the Middle Ages, like the Certosa at
Florence and the Carmelites of the same old town, that were, and
perhaps are yet, practically the dispensaries of the city. Indeed, one
might add a page to the famous lecture of Wendell Phillips on the "Lost
Arts," were he to recount the benefits conferred on the medical
sciences by the devotion of the medheval clergy to the plain people.
Only the other day, in reading Ian MacLaren's touching stories in the
"Bonnie Brier Bush," I was led to reflect how much silent heroism of
the same kind was practised in the mediaeval times, when a village
doctor was unheard of, and the only available skill lay down in the
valley or up on the tall crag where the men of God spent their innocent
and beneficent days. Thus, whatever path of history or
facts we tread backward for thirteen or fourteen centuries, we shall
always find that the only stanch and loyal friend of the poor man was
the Catholic priest; that all the useful and indispensable arts and
professions of social life were gathered up by him out of the great
wreck of Graeco-Roman life, or created anew amid the turbulence and
lawlessness of barbarism; that law and medicine found in him a humble
but a useful bridge by which they were rescued from the flood of
oblivion and ruin; that the homely utilities of the soil, of food and
drink, of clothing, the more complicated processes of production and
distribution, were very largely dependent on him in all parts of
Europe. At the top notch of his estate he was bishop or abbot, at the
bottom poor parish priest or monk, -- but ever he was a friend of the
people, and he earned their gratitude by an anonymous devotion, a
nameless self-sacrifice, that covered one thousand years of the infancy
of our modern states and was really their period of gestation and
nursing.

IV.

While the Church was developing among the youthful nations of Europe
the notion of the common weal, the higher good of the
commonwealth, she was also creating another entirely new institution,
the Christian Law of Nations, or what is known to-day as International
Law. The old Roman law did indeed recognize, gradually, a certain
universal province of general rights, but it was only in the domain of
private law, of the relations between one individual and another, such
as contracts and obligations, wills and judgments, and the like; of a
public law applicable to all peoples, higher than all and eminently
fair to all, it had not the slightest inkling, and has left us no
trace. Rome acknowledged no equal before the bar of mankind. The only
civilization that ever withstood her, the old Persian, she pursued and
harried to the death. Perhaps in that dread hour, when the grim fanatic
Arab arose in his stirrup above the prostrate bodies of Roman and
Persian, it dawned upon both that they would better have arbitrated
their pretensions, but it was too late. On the dial of time no power
can turn back the solemn finger of history. It was otherwise with the
Catholic Church in the West. She was the mother and nurse of a whole
brood of young and ardent peoples, full of high and vague impulses,
naturally jealous of one another, but also mutually
respectful of the great holy power that they felt was lifting them
steadily toward the light. In their infancy their first missionaries
had been sent by Rome, and bore aloft their authority from the central
see of Christendom. In time one agent of Rome, after another appeared
to allay the fires of domestic hatred and revenge, to put bounds to
ambition, to compel the execution of treaties, to protect the injured
who were without redress. Often these men were of any nationality;
whatever shrewd head offered itself, whatever experience of mankind was
at hand, Rome accepted. Every kingdom and great family in Europe
received and welcomed these men. Every decade of the Middle Ages is
filled with their good deeds. They represent a central authority,
entirely moral and resting on personal conviction of its • sanctity.
They appeal to the common law of the gospel and the general customs of
Christian life and experience. They brought to their tasks a suavity of
manner and a persistency of method that the lay world admired
instinctively. The opposition they could not break down they turned.
Peace was their object as war was the purpose of the feudal world. In
time they created an unwritten code that governed the to say the least. It is the play of Hamlet with the
noble Dane left out. A universal peace is a mockery so long as
religious convictions do not dominate the ancient and natural impulses
of selfishness, public and private, the cruel leonine policy of the
world from Sargon to Napoleon.

V.

It is a commonplace saying that there is no social progress possible
without the recognition of authority in the State, and a respectful
submission to its due and licit exercise. But of what avail is all this
if there be no habitual discipline in the minds and hearts of men? It
is the creation of this docile temper, this trained submission to
just law and custom, that is one of the great glories of the
Catholic Church. The modern world, in as far as it possesses this
benefit, inherits it from her. A century of wild and incoherent efforts
to base social obedience on any other lines than those she preaches has
resulted in anarchy, or a practical appeal to her to help control the
masses from whose hearts the balancing ideas of God, future
retribution, sin, immortality, were driven by every ingenious means
that could be devised. Neither Plato nor Aristotle,
neither Zeno nor Cicero nor Seneca, were able to establish a code of
principles that would command the willing and affectionate acceptance
of all men amid all the changing circumstances of life. Only Jesus
Christ could do that. Hence His gospel is not only the noblest
revelation of God to man, but also a political document of the highest
rank, as the centuries to come will most certainly demonstrate.
Throughout the Middle Ages the Catholic Church was the sole recognized
interpreter of this gospel. Her decisions were law. Her comments were
final. She did not call on men to obey a human will; it was the divine
figure and will of Jesus that she held up before men. It was not by
preaching herself or her achievements that she compelled the unwilling
submission of the most violent men the world has seen, men in whose
blood the barbarian strain was still hot and arrogant. Let any one read
the great "Papal Letters" of the Middle Ages, the letters of Gregory I.
to King Ethelbert, of Gregory VII. to Henry IV. of Germany, of
Alexander III. to Henry II. of England, of Innocent III. to all the
potentates of Europe, and the magnificent letters of the nonagenarian
Gregory IX. to Frederick II., and he will be astounded
at the richness and abundance of pure gospel teaching, at the cogency
of the texts, at the vigor and apostolic candor of their application.
Judges and prophets, bishops and apostles, -- these men speak as man
never spoke before. And when their utterances were heralded in a few
weeks all over Europe by the swiftest processes then known to man, the
innocent looked up and rejoiced, the oppressed breathed easier, those
who hungered and thirsted for justice had their desire fulfilled. The
tyrant shook on his throne and all the ministers of religion felt that
an invincible force had been infused into them. The moral battle had
been won; let gross might do its worst. Kings of every nation quailed
before those dread spiritual arrows; minor potentates stifled their
evil passions for very fear of Rome; the unholy and impure let go the
estates that they had robbed, either from the weak or from the Church;
the usurer lifted his hand from the throat of his victim; the orphans'
rights were vindicated and the widows' portion restituted. The holy law
of monogamous marriage, of one man to one woman, was successfully
defended; kingdoms were risked, and one day lost, for the sake of a
principle. To all the sacredness of life was declared again and again
-- "Thou shalt not kill" -- neither thy neighbor in
unjust violence, nor thyself as God's own, nor the child in the womb.
In a century of savage anarchy she declared the famous Truce of God
that practically prevented warfare for more than half the year. Her
altars were always places of refuge against hasty and unjust vengeance.
She forbade any one to mount the steps of those altars whose hand was
stained with the blood of his fellow-man. In that long night of storm
and conflict she was everywhere the White Angel of Peace, everywhere,
like the Valkyries, a presence hovering over the multitudinous scene of
battle, but not like them an urger of death -- rather the vicarious
voice of God, His gentle spouse, bidding the hell of angry selfishness
subside appealing, in season and out of season, to the conscience of
mankind, its natural probity, above all to the love and the will of the
Crucified One.

And so her own law grew, -- men called it in time the Canon Law, --
i.e. the law made up of the rules and regulations established by
the authority of the Church. She disdained no human help and she loaned
her strength to many a humane and good measure. But the substance of it
all is the gospel; the spirit of it is one of peace, of
friendly composition and arbitration where possible; its very
punishments have -- what was unknown to the laws of mankind before her
-- a medicinal or healing character. Hitherto men were punished as a
revenge of society for transgressing its collective will. Now men are
punished that they may enter into themselves and be enlightened, and
seeing, be made to walk as straight as they see; that is, be corrected.

Think of this legislation gradually spreading over all Europe from
Sicily to Iceland, accepted as a quasi-divine code by all, and one sees
at once what a stern but enduring discipline was imposed on men's
hearts. Obedience was hard, but it was useful. It was humiliating, but
it cleansed and comforted. It was painful, but it made men Godlike,
since it was exercised to imitate and please Him who had first given
the most splendid example of obedience. The Lombard Gastaldo at Friuli,
and the Duke at Spoleto, the Frank Comes at Tours or Limoges, the
Exarch at Ravenna, the Herzog in the Marches, all looked on and
wondered and trembled at the popular submission to one weak man's will.
For the first time moral dignity prevailed, and the authoritative
sentence of the successor of the Fisherman had more
weight than the laws of a dozen kings. This was a great step, for it
lifted the administration of justice out of and beyond the sphere of
the personal and temporary into a high and serene atmosphere. It made
the face of the judge to shine with a light reflected from heaven. It
gave a kind of immortality to every utterance. It was like a new
stringer laid on the fair and holy walls of the temple of justice. The
decisions of one pope were sacred to his successor, and the wicked had
the assurance that there was no reopening of their career before a
tribunal that had judged them by the law of God.

Such an authority, sacred and intangible by reason of long and useful
services to European society, could deal with all civil authorities on
the highest level. It had nothing to gain from flattery and nothing to
fear from their ill-will. It had known the gloom of the Catacombs, the
turbulent and selfish fondness of the first Christian emperors, the
whims and vagaries of the barbarous nations turned Christian. It is no
exaggeration to say that the civil authority of the Middle Ages is the
disciple of the Church. It learned from her the nature, scope, and
spirit of authority. It got through her the most order. The principles of justice,
the equity of war and peace, the nice points that affect the king's
conscience, are decided by them. In "Henry V.," the king invokes the
judgment of the bishops as to the moral character of his contemplated
expedition against France.

"My learned lord, we pray thee to proceed, And justly and religiously
unfold Why the law Salique that they have in France Or should or should
not bar us in our claim. * * * * * * * *

And we will hear, note and believe in heart That what you speak is in
your conscience wash'd As pure as sin in baptism." -- Act I., Scene 1.

The whole trend of public opinion in the Middle Ages was so
overwhelmingly in this sense that it would have seemed an anachronism
to have made the bishops of England assume an attitude different from
what they had always held in ages gone by. So, too, in the Holy Roman
Empire of the German Nation that theoretically dominated the political
situation in Europe, the chancellor of the empire was always the
Archbishop of Trier, and as such was the emperor's spiritual adviser in
all that pertained to justice or equity in public affairs or
enterprises. In other words, the great States of Europe grew from
infancy to manhood under the solemn and public tutelage
of the Catholic Church. What is good and lasting in their government
they owe to her; what is faulty and imperfect to their own inordinate
ambitions.

The greatest public act that could fall to a churchman to perform in
the Middle Ages was the anointing and coronation of a king. It is among
the solemn acts reserved to a bishop, and as such is found in the Roman
Pontifical. In one of the great prayers said over the new king, the
Catholic Church has herself given the character, measure, and spirit of
the civil duties of a regent of the people. It is almost a summary of
her own career throughout the shifting and difficult circumstances of
mediaeval life.

VI.

Such a power as the Catholic Church, deeply rooted in history and in
the hearts of all the nations of Europe, had necessarily a more than
ordinary influence on the social life of the people and the
institutions in which it manifested itself. I cannot do more than touch
summarily on some important points. Those institutions that affect
woman are fundamental in every society. With an instinct
both true and keen, the Catholic Church, at the break-up of the old
Greek and Roman world, set herself to protect the weaker sex. It was
now a world in which the example of the strong and the rich was all
contagious. Bravely and persistently she resisted the attempts of the
aristocracy from emperor and king downward to introduce polygamy. As
the great nobles grew independent they grew restless under the
restraint imposed upon ordinary men and asserted for themselves
immunity from the law of the gospel. But. they found in the popes and
the Catholic clergy, generally, a wall of brass that they essayed in
vain to overthrow. The history of her marriage legislation, of her
dealing with divorce, is one of the proudest pages in the life of the
mediaeval Church. In every nation of Europe the battle had to be fought
over and over again, and always with the same result, "Thou shalt not."
We have yet, for example, the admirable letters written by Innocent
III. to Ingelberge, the repudiated wife of Philip Augustus. They
furnish a sufficient commentary on the long catalogue of royal
matrimonial causes that were ever before the Roman court through the
Middle Ages. The impediments that she placed to certain
marriages had each its own justification in history, in the relations
with the civil power, or in that sure instinct of what was for the
welfare of the people that I have already referred to. Thus the
impediment of close relationship acted very efficaciously in preventing
the accumulation of land and power in the hands of a few families, not
to speak of other useful consequences. It must be remembered that, as
to those impediments that she created by positive enactment or by
hallowing custom, she must be judged from the view-point of the times
and the circumstances. Apropos of the transmission of wealth, had the
mediaeval clergy been a married clergy, the wealth of Europe would have
passed to their children, their great benefices would have been
hereditary, and instead of an humble class of men rising by their own
efforts to the highest rank, we should have seen the great prizes of
the ecclesiastical life handed down by the laws of human affection,
with the invariable decay of every ecclesiastical virtue and the
spiritual ruin of the European population.

If the Church built high the barrier about woman in some directions, in
others she left her a freedom unknown to the ancients and opened to her a career of extraordinary utility. No one might coerce
her into marriage; the cloister was ever open. Only those who know how
uncertain the perpetual turbulence of the Middle Ages made the
condition of woman, how sad the life of the widow, the orphan, the
desolate maiden, can appreciate the benefit that these holy refuges
were to women in this stormy period. Woman governed freely such
institutions, and when they arose to prominence, her position was only
less enviable than that of a queen. As abbess of a great mediaeval
monastery, she disposed of many and vast estates and revenues, and
enjoyed in her own person the highest distinctions of Church and State.
In marriage the freedom of her consent was especially safeguarded; her
position and rights were the same as those of the husband, and if she
was inferior in what pertained to the disposition of property, it must
not be forgotten that mediaeval life was in many respects different
from our own, that man alone could bear the burdens of life as it was
then lived. The bishop's court in the Middle Ages was another benefit
to woman. Usually it was the court for wills and testaments, and well
it was, for the bishop was naturally the father of the helpless and the
lowly.

Of two other conditions of life I shall say but one word
-- the poor and the slave. So long as a monastery existed, no poor man
could go hungry, and the duty of giving to the hungry and the poor was
looked on everywhere as the holiest of all. War, pestilence, famine,
worked their ravages, it is true, but in ordinary life the hungry and
starving poor were rare in mediaeval Europe. Nor was this accomplished
by statute law, nor with painful humiliation, but in love, for Jesus'
sake, because He, too, had been a poor man; because the poor man bore
the likeness and image of the Creator even as his richer brother;
because, after all, the rich man was only the steward of his wealth and
not its absolute owner. As for slavery, the Church did not formally
abolish it, but it was incompatible with her doctrine and life. It
gradually lapsed into servage; the serf was attached to the soil, a
great blessing for him. He was often the Church's own man, and so he
gradually merged into the free peasant, very largely through the agency
of local churches, only too anxious to preserve on their lands the same
families, with their knowledge of the soil and their loyalty to the
owners.

As to money itself and its functions, the mediaeval
Church knew not our wonderful development of industry and commerce. It
was an agricultural world, and money did not seem productive in itself.
Usury was the supremest hardship for the poor, as it is yet felt in
purely agricultural lands like Russia and India. It was forbidden under
the severest penalties, and out of sympathy with the multitudes that
would otherwise have suffered incredibly in a time when their little
bit of land, their crops, and their implements were all that nine out
of ten poor men could ever hope to own. As to the uses of wealth
itself, the ideas of the Middle Ages were thoroughly humane, even
grandiose. Surplus wealth was not man's, but God's. The owner was the
steward, the administrator, and he was bound, after providing for the
suitable support of his own, according to their estate in life, to
bestow it in other good works. Moreover, thereby he could atone while
yet alive for his shortcomings; he could further the relief of the
poor, the weak, and friendless; he could be a helper of God in the
government of this world; he could root out the ugliest of all social
cancers, the cancer of ignorance; he could elevate to God's glory a
noble temple; he could provide the sweet boon of education for those
who would never know its uses had not some generous soul
been moved by such ideas. So common were these views that it was seldom
a man or woman died without making some provision for the poor, for
religion, for education. These moneys in turn flowed back into the
community, and a perpetual exchange of good offices went on between the
individual and the institution his generosity either created or
sustained. So much money was given to education in Germany just before
the Reformation that Martin Luther used to say it was almost impossible
for a child to go ignorant under the papacy. So education,
architecture, the fine arts, the social needs, were forever provided
for by the overflowing treasury of popular gift, and the Catholic
people in turn escaped the danger of idealizing their wealth and
hoarding it too jealously against a future that they had no means of
controlling. Thus, for instance, arose countless grammar schools in
Scotland and England that were so numerous before the Reformation that
the poorest boy could get a classical education in his own town and
thereby enter the clergy. In Germany, France, and Italy, a similar
education was to be had with almost the same ease, and that meant in
those days the open door to office, preferment, and
wealth. Countless associations were endowed for the care of the poor,
the burial of the dead, the dowering of poor girls, and the relief of
every form of misery. If men made money largely, they spent it
generously and intelligently. There was, perhaps, no time in the
history of mankind, not even our own last few years, when men devoted
to public uses so large a portion of their wealth. Not the least cause
of it was the Catholic doctrine of the utility of good works for the
welfare of the soul. Old churches were repaired; new ones were built
all over Europe. Indeed, both Dr. Janssen and Dom Gasquet have slmwn,
not only that the generosity of the fifteenth century was as great
proportionately as that of any other age of the Church, but that it was
extremely popular in kind, i.e. that down to the eve of the
Reformation the people generally accepted the mediaeval view of the
uses of money, notably for the common good. Shakespeare, who is so
often the perfect echo of mediaeval thought and temper, puts into the
mouth of the good Griffith as the best praise of the fallen Woolsey
that he had built two noble schools for the education of youth, -- a
grammar school and a university college: --

Ever witness for him Those twins of learning that he
reared in you Ipswich and Oxford I one of which fell with him,
Unwilling to outlive the good he did it; The other unfinished yet so
famous, So excellent in art, and still so rising That Christendom shall
ever speak his virtue."

-- "Henry VIII., Act IV., Scene 1.

VII.

In the early Middle Ages the sense of the common weal was very
imperfect. The Wandering Nations had developed the kingship through
long and permanent conflicts, first among themselves, and then with
Rome. But we see on all sides among them the rudest and most original
independence. Here the great unity and centralization of the Church
were as models to the State, that little by little arose to a similar
concept. We have only to follow, for instance, the history of France
from the days of Gregory of Tours to the foundation of the Capetian
monarchy, to see how the churchmen contributed to the unification and
solidarity of that great State. So, too, in England, the separate
little kingdoms are brought ever closer together under the influence of
Canterbury, its bishops, its synods, and the general unity of
ecclesiastical life that was there constantly visible
since the time of St. Augustine. The mixed synods and councils of the
early Middle Ages in England, Germany, France, Spain, were also a
training school for the lay governors of society. They learned from the
better educated ecclesiastics how to conduct popular assemblies with
something more than the rude simplicity of their German forefathers by
the Rhine or the Elbe.

They learned, as we have seen, the use of written records, the patient
sustaining of contradiction, the yielding to the majority, the power of
eloquence and learning. But they learned something holier still -- to
look on public life from a moral point of view, to consider their
offices as a trust from God, to become familiar with the idea that all
power was from God and not from their great spears and their strong
arms. Little by little generations of rulers were formed who owned
enlightened consciences and listened to them, instead of the wild
passions that were once their sole guides. Far deeper and more
immediate than the influences of Rome and Greece on the modern state
are the Christian influences. These are original and organic, the
former academic and secondary. Later, indeed, the common
missionary enterprises, the opposition to Islam, the Crusades, bound
all Christendom together in links of common sacrifice and ideals that
could nevermore be forgotten.

I have already called attention to the signal services rendered by the
Church in all that pertains to the administration of justice, the
cornerstone of human society. In the preservation of the Roman
procedure, the new views of the nature and uses of punishment as a
"medicinalis operatio," in the obstacle that the right of asylum set
against unjust vindictive haste, in the introduction of written
evidence, she ‘saved some admirable old elements and added some new
ones to the civil life of European peoples.

The sanctity of oaths was insisted on by her, and the utmost
horror of perjury inculcated. In the great mediaeval veneration for the
relics of the saints and martyrs and confessors she, found a fresh
means of compelling veracity and obedience on the part of the wicked
and tyrannical. Many a wild baron or marauding noble cowered when he
was asked to swear or promise by the relics of St. Cuthbert or St.
Columbanus, St. Genevieve or St. Martin, and gave back ill-gotten gains
that a king could not have taken from him.

VIII.

If we would understand well the Middle Ages, we must ever keep in view
that in those times public life was dominated by two great functional
ideas -- the sense of personality and the sense of
responsibility. Throughout those centuries, it was the universal
persuasion that the final end of society was the perfection of each
individual soul, or rather, its individual salvation. Not the comforts
of life, nor an increasing refinement and complexity of earthly
pleasures, not the scouring of earth and sea to minister to one hour's
enjoyment, were the ideals of the best men and women of those times.
Neither did they seek in the organic development of the collective
unit, the earthly society, their last and sufficient end. To them it
seemed that human society was organized, not as an end in itself, but
as a means to enable men to know, love, and serve the Master on this
earth and be happy with Him in the next. Whatever furthered these views
of life was good, and all things were bad or indifferent in the measure
that they fell away from or were useless for this end. This is why the
great men of the Middle Ages are not its warriors, not its legislators,
not even its great priests and bishops, but its
saints. In a closer personal union with God men found the highest
uses and meanings of life. It was a temperament essentially spiritual,
mystic, that forever urged men and women to neglect, even despise, what
was temporary or earthly, to aspire to a world beyond the low horizon
of threescore-ten and the grave. Holiness, a god-like purity of mind
and heart, thorough detachment from the mortal and attachment to the
immortal and the divine, was the keynote of this thousand years.

During this time it is in saintly men like Patrick, Columbanus,
Benedict, Boniface, Norbert, Bernard, Thomas of Aquino, Dominic, and
Francis of Assisi; in saintly women like Bridget, Radegunda, Cunegonda,
Elizabeth, Catharine of Sienna, that we must look for the fine flower
of Christian growth. Since the Renaissance, with its reassertion of the
basic principles of paganism, it has been ever more fashionable to tax
the Middle Ages with an impossible mysticism, with an unjust contempt
for the beauty and comfort of the human body, with a false view of
man's relations to the earth on which he lives and subsists, and the
society to which he necessarily belongs. It is not my purpose just now
to defend the mediaeval view, other than to say that is more magnetism, more
genuine inspiration, in such a world and life than in a period of
golden but general elevation, when all is mediocre by the mere fact
that no one rises much above the general level. Just so, there are
those who believe that the rude hard life of the early history of our
country developed more superior character than the cosmopolitan
perfection we now enjoy; that the strenuous days of the pioneers
brought out more virtue than the finished municipal organism of the
present; that the true use of history consists in the great characters
it reveals and uplifts; that one view of the solitary white peaks of
the Rockies is worth a week's journey across the fat plains of the Red
River or Manitoba.

Just because the view of life popular in the Middle Ages pivoted on
personality, it was replete to the saturation point with a sense of
responsibility. How this affected the relations of man with God I
have just indicated. It was the true source of sanctity, and its
prevalence is shown by the great multitude of holy men and women who
meet us on every page of mediaeval history and in every stage of its
evolution. In man's dealings with society, it affected profoundly his
concept of public office. According to Christian teaching all power
comes from God and is held for the benefit of one's
fellow-mortals. It is not a personal inheritance, a thing transmissible
or to be disposed of by private will. Power over others is vicarious,
the act of an agent, and as such its use is to be accounted for. The
Church had not to go far to impress that idea on the clergy. It was
brought out in letters of gold in the pastoral epistles of St. Paul,
who only develops the idea set forth in the gospel. It was otherwise
with the civil power. The lucky soldier who rose to wear the imperial
purple had no education save that of the camp. The fierce Frank or
Burgundian noble who had waded through blood to the high seat of
Merovingian kingship thought only to enjoy the fruit of his courage and
good fortune. But they met a priest at the foot of the throne who
warned them that the power was not theirs, but a trust from God; they
heard a voice from the altar on holydays depicting the true kingship,
that of David, of Solomon, of Constantine, of Gratian. They met at the
council-table venerable bishops and abbots who discussed all methods
from a view-point of divine revelation — notably of Christian history
and the spirit of Jesus Christ. There was anger enough at this
perpetual schooling, wild outbursts of passion that they could have no peace with these obstinate priests, fierce excesses of
cruelty and periods of reaction. But the Catholic clergy succeeded in
stilling the furnaces of passion that were the barbarian royal hearts,
and in creating a public opinion in favor of an ideal Christian ruler.
And when once a great ruler like Charlemagne had risen to incarnate so
many Christian public virtues of a master of men, his memory was held
in benediction by all, and his shadow fell across all the centuries to
come, blotting out the irregular and bloody past, and forecasting the
great royal saints of a later day -- a Henry of Germany, an Elizabeth
of Thuringia, an Edward of England, a Stephen of Hungary, a Louis of
France, a Wenceslaus of Bohemia. In time, this practical education of
mediaeval rulers became academic, and we have a long catalogue of
"instructions" for kings, "warnings" for kings, beginning with the
golden booklet of the deacon Agapetus to his master the great Emperor
Justinian, and coming down over seven hundred years to the fine
treatise attributed to St. Thomas Aquinas, "On the Government of
Princes." You will see little reference to such. in the ordinary
histories of pedagogy. Yet they have had profound influence in forming
royal youth at a time when the happiness of peoples
depended much on the personality of their rulers. Public office was
therefore a quasi-priestly thing in the Middle Ages, a trust, a
deposit, and the proper administration of it a knightly thing,
something to affect the conscience almost like the honor of the soldier
or the good name of woman.

No doubt there was plenty of human weakness, plenty of hideous
contradiction of those ideals. But the ideals themselves were held up
and even realized. Thereby no European people could fall into utter
servitude morally and mentally like the subjects of imperial Rome or
the millions of bureaucratic China. In the resplendent gospel of Jesus
Christ, in the self-identical and constant teachings of His Church, in
the great and shining examples of His saints, there was a source of
self-judgment and self-uplifting that could never be quite dried up,
and which, from time to time, the Angel of Reform came down and touched
with salutary effect.

IX.

There is a story told of Ataulf, the general of the Goths and the
successor of Alaric, the conqueror of Rome, at the beginning of this
period, that he had long meditated the extinction of the and the principles, of social authority in
the State, such as it had been evolved at Rome in the long conflict of
peoples and races that kept steadily widening from the Tiber to the
extremities of the habitable world. The homely republican virtues of
Old Rome, the humane and discriminating soul of Greek philosophy, the
vast ambitions of the Orient, the tradition of a golden age of equality
and simplicity, the profound knowledge of the average human mind and
its norms of action, a religious respect for distributive justice, a
great sense of the utility and loveliness of peace and harmony -- all
these are so many visible traits or elements of the Roman law that
render it applicable in all times to all mankind -- what St. Augustine
used to call "human reason itself set down in writing."

This law the Catholic Church through Europe elected to live by herself,
at a time when every barbarian had the rude law of his own forest or
mountains. Wherever a Catholic bishop governed, or a priest went as a
missionary, he bore with him the fulness of the law of Rome. It clung
to his person when the civil centres were laid desolate, Rome, Milan,
London and York, Saragossa, Paris, Trier, Cologne. The law of contracts, the law of last wills and testaments, the laws that
govern the life of the citizen in the walled town and the peasant in
the open field, the general principles and the practical case-law that
Rome had been creating from the Rhine to the Euphrates and from the
Grampians to Mount Atlas, were now in the custody of the same hands
that bore aloft the gospel through the forests of Germany, or uplifted
the Christian sacrifice over the smoking ruins of the proudest cities
of ancient Europe.

It is owing to the Catholic Church that we now enjoy a regular
procedure in the administration of law. Our legal procedure is
substantially that of the Roman law. The barbarian peoples long
detested the regular slow order of Roman justice. They despised the
written proof, the summoning of witnesses, the delays, exceptions, and
appeals that secure the innocent or helpless from oppression, and
compel even the most reluctant to acknowledge the justice of
condemnation. In all these centuries the Church applied this procedure
to her own clerics in every land, and embodied it in the Canon Law that
was the same the world over, as Roman law had been the same the world
over. The justice of the barbarian was summary, violent, and productive
of endless vendettas. The terrible German Faustrecht,
the Vehmgerichte of the Middle Ages, like the work of our lynching
committees, were a last relic of what was once universal. After the
fall of the Roman power, there was no one but the Catholic Church to
represent the social authority as such over against the wild and savage
feelings of a multitude of barbarians, intoxicated with the glory of
conquest and the riches of the degenerate but luxurious world of Gaul
and Italy. When Clovis, the founder of the French monarchy, was
distributing the booty after a great battle, he set aside for himself a
tall and precious vase. Thereupon a great Frank stepped out of the
ranks, and with his spear shattered the vase in pieces. "O King, thou
shalt have thy share," he cried, "and no more!" Clovis swallowed his
wrath. The next year while reviewing his army, he passed before his
bold contradictor, and noticing some negligence about his dress, bade
him correct it. As the latter stooped to tie the string of his shoe,
the king lifted his own huge spear and drove it through the neck of the
soldier. Thus a victorious king administered justice, and it is typical
of what went on for centuries through Europe.

It was the bishops of the Church who induced the
barbarians to temper their own laws and customs with the law of Rome.
And whatever laws we study -- those of France, or Germany, or Spain, or
England, or Ireland -- we shall find that when we come to the line
where they emerge from barbarism or paganism, the transition is
effected by Catholic bishops and priests. Throughout the Middle Ages
all law was looked on as coming from God, as holy, and therefore in a
way subject to the approval and custody of the Church. It was the crown
of the moral order, the basis of right conduct, and hence the royal
chanceries of Europe were always governed by an ecclesiastic, whose
duty it was to enlighten the king's conscience, and to see that neither
the gospel nor the spirit of it were infringed.

The hasty, vindictive quality of barbarian justice was long tempered by
the Right of Asylum, which the churches and great monasteries afforded.
The greatest criminals could find shelter there, as in the Cities of
Refuge of Israel, if not against punishment, at least against
punishment without trial or defence.

On the judge's bench one could often see the Catholic bishop, sometimes
administering the law of the State by order of the king, sometimes the
counsellor of a soldier or noble ignorant of law and
procedure, sometimes the defender of a town or city overburdened with
taxes or tributes, sometimes the lawyer of the oppressed and the
innocent. He is the real man of law, the real representative of order
and justice, and for many long centuries the whole fabric of society
depended on the succession of good and devoted men in the hierarchy of
the Church throughout Europe. They kept alive the sanctity of oaths,
without which there is no sure justice. The latter is based on the fear
of God, and only the Catholic Church could emphasize that idea in those
ages of bloodshed and violence. It was well that such men feared
something -- the anger of God, the wrath of the saints over whose
relics they swore, the pains of hell --otherwise there would have been
no bounds to the arbitrary excesses of a feudal aristocracy that
despised all beneath it, and was ready to cut down with the sword any
attempt to dominate it. Let any one read the private lives of some
Merovingian. and Caroling kings, or the annals that tell the story of
Italy in the tenth century and again in the fourteenth, and he will see
to what depths of impious blasphemy the mediaeval man could sink when
he once lost his fear of the Catholic Church.

It was the Catholic clergy who taught these barbarians
how to administer society, who wrote out the formulas of government,
the charters, the diplomas, the numerous documents needed to carry on
the smallest community where there is any respect for property, office,
personal rights and duties. From the registry of fields and houses to
the correspondence between king and king, between emperor and pope, all
the writing of the Middle Ages was long in the hands of the clergy.
Thereby they saved to the commonwealths of Europe in their infancy no
little remnant of old Roman habits of government, traditions of
economy, order, equity, that they had taken over from the hands of the
laymen of Rome during the fifth century, when the empire was breaking
up every year, like a ship upon cruel rocks in a night of storm and
despair.

In these centuries the frequent synods and councils of the bishops and
priests were to the world of Europe what our Parliament and Congress
are to-day. The brain and the heart of Europe was then the Catholic
clergy. In their frequent meetings the barbarian could see how to
conduct a public assembly, the distinction of rank and office, the uses
of written records and documents, the individual self-
assertion, and the vote by majorities, the appeals to experience, to
history, to past meetings, to the law of God in the Old and New
Testament. He could see the stern and even justice dealt out by the
ecclesiastics to their own delinquent members -- deposition,
degradation, exile. He could see how these churchmen, when gathered
together, feared no earthly power, and asserted the rights of the poor
and the lowly against every oppression, however high placed. He could
see how they feared no condition of men, and reproved popular vices as
well as royal lust and avarice. He could see how every order and estate
in the Church had its right to representation in these synods and
councils. The day will come in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries
when civil parliaments will arise -- the first germs of the great
legislative bodies of our day -- but their cradle will always remain
the mediaeval meeting in which churchmen, and often the laymen with
them, laid the first beams of constitutional government.

X.

When we say that the Catholic Church was the principal almost the only
educator of the Middle Ages, we assert a fact
that to all historians is as evident as sunlight. To begin with, all
the schools were hers. Such schools as were saved here and there in
Southern France and Northern Italy out of the wreck of the Roman State
and Empire were saved by her. Her bishops, indeed, from the fifth to
the eighth century were more bent on the defence of the weak and the
poor than on aught else, on the conquest of the barbarian character,
the quenching of its fires of avarice, luxury, lawlessness.
Nevertheless, many were patrons of learning, like St. Avitus of Vienne,
from whose writings Milton did not disdain to borrow more than one
beauty of his "Paradise Lost"; St. Caesarius of Aries, a patron of
learning whose relative, St. Caesaria, was one of the first to impose
on the nuns of her community the copying and illumination of
manuscripts; St. Nicetius of Trier, St. Gregory of Tours, and many
other similar men. But, generally, all such men considered that they
were in a conflagration, in a storm; the principal education was that
of their wild and ferocious masters. Let any one read the pages of
Gregory of Tours in his Ecclesiastical History of the Franks, or the
charming volume of Augustine Thierry on the Merovingian kings and their
courts, and he will understand what a great and hard
task lay before these Gallo-Roman bishops, who stood for law and order
and civilization, as well as religion, against victorious barbarians
whose veneer of refinement only hid the hottest fires of human passion.

The schools which every Catholic bishop from the beginning necessarily
conducted, in order to keep up an enlightened clergy, were never
abandoned. The archdeacon, in this savage time, looked after them. They
are numerous in Gaul, in Italy, in Spain. The classics are studied in
them, the history of the Christian Church, the laws of the Church and
the State. Schoolmasters arose, like Boethius, Cassiodorus, and later
the saintly Bede, Isidore of Seville, and Alcuin, not to speak of the
multitude of Irish masters. The manuals and teaching of these men
lasted in many places fully one thousand years. It was not the highest
standard of learning, but it was all that could be hoped for, and much
more than the great majority wanted in a period of blood and iron, when
society was a-forming again, and men could seriously ask themselves
whether one hour of bestial enjoyment was not worth a century of study.
Side by side with the numerous episcopal schools went the little schools of the new monasteries, where the novices of the
Benedictines, the children of their peasants, those of the nobles who
had any idealism, could and did learn the principles and elements of
reading, writing, arithmetic, eloquence, music, geometry, and
geography. The art of handwriting was kept up, and the skill of the
ancients in decorating manuscripts was saved. Out of it, as out of a
chrysalis, shall one day come a Raphael and a Michael Angelo. The
bishops profited by the good dispositions of Charlemagne and other
upright kings, like Alfred of England, to inculcate a love of learning
and to keep alive their schools and the supply of masters -- no easy
thing in the darkest days of the Middle Ages, when culture was timid
and stay-at-home. Much refinement was kept alive within the peaceful
precincts of the nunneries all over Europe. The noble pages of Count
Montalembert on the Anglo-Saxon nuns ought to be read by all. The art
of embroidery, of lace-working, of delicate handiwork in cloth and
leather, the skill in illuminating and the covering of books, the
domestic art of cooking, the arts that flourish in the immediate shadow
of the altar, and those nameless graces of adornment that woman bears
everywhere with her as an atmosphere -- all flourished
in these homes of virtue, calm and reserved amid the din of war,
themselves an element of education in Christian eyes, since they upheld
the great basic principles of our religion -- self-restraint and self-
denial.

We shall leave to the Arabs of Spain the merit and the credit honestly
due them for their refinement and their civilization at a time when
Christendom was surely inferior in many ways. But the Christendom of
the ninth and tenth centuries was necessarily armed to the teeth
against these very Spanish Arabs, in whose blood the new tinge of Greek
culture, caught from learned Jews and Oriental Christianity, was too
weak surely to withstand the hot current of the desert that surged
successfully within them. Christianity has what no other religion has -
- a divine power of reform, which is nothing else than an uplifting of
the common heart to its Divine Founder, a cry of Peccavi, and an honest
resolution to live again by His spirit and His principles. It cannot,
therefore, sink beneath a certain level, cannot become utterly sensual,
utterly barbarous and pagan.

The Middle Ages had two schools, wherein the individual heart could
always, at any and every moment, rise to the highest
level -- the worship of Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament, and the loving
veneration of His Blessed Mother. The former was a perpetual spring of
noble conceptions of life, a spur of godliness, an incentive to
repentance, a live coal on every altar, whose perfume penetrated all
who am proached, and attracted and consumed with the holiest of loves
the very susceptible hearts of mediaeval men and women not yet "blas‚s"
with the deceptions of materialism, yet living in and by faith, yet
believing in God, Judgment, Heaven, and Hell. All the architecture and
fine arts of the Middle Ages are there. They are thank-offerings,
creations of love, and as such, stamped with an individual something, a
personal note that disappears when faith grows cold. In the "Lauda Sion
Salvatorem," of St. Thomas, we hear the most majestic expression of the
influence of Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament on the daily spiritual life
of mediaeval Europe, just as the Duomo of Orvieto reflects His action
upon the hearts of the artists of Italy, and the feast of Corpus
Christi enshrines forever His plastic transforming power in the
widening and deepening of the Christian liturgy.

As to the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Middle Ages were
solicited on all sides by the mystery and the beauty of this type. Only
once did it enter the mind of man to imagine in one and the same woman
the serenity of the noblest matron, the pathos of the most loving
motherhood, and the white splendor of stainless maidenhood! Only once
did the heavens bend so close to the earth, and leave a human heart
glorified as a pledge of their love, as an earnest of their value and
their reality, as a souvenir of long-forgotten days of primal innocence
and joy! With an unerring Greek sense of order and beauty, the earliest
Christian artists seized on this new, transforming, moulding idea. They
saw in it something sacramental, something that was at once a symbol
and a force. Jesus had proclaimed that God was love, and His religion
therefore a service of love. In the Maiden Mary that idea of love was
tangible, immediate, eloquent, in our poor human way.

True, there was the supreme beauty of the Godhead, of Jesus Christ! But
that was an original, flawless, essential beauty. It shone all too
remotely, too sternly and solemnly; the earthly element was there,
indeed, but suffering, shot through with hideous streaks of sorrow and
debasement.

But here in this type of the Mother and Child that
divine love which is the root and the crown of Christianity, its sap
and support, is brought within human reach. We can handle its strong
fires, as it were, without being scorched or wasted by them.* Between the puissant Maker, the
omniscient Judge, and our littleness there is interposed a thoroughly
human figure of sympathy, pity, and tenderness all made up, herself the
most lovely creation of the divine hands, and yet the most human of our
kind.

XI.

I make only passing reference to the great universities of the Middle
Ages. Every one knows that from Paris to Glasgow, from Bologna to
Aberdeen, they are papal creations, living and thriving on the
universal character and privileges they drew from the papal
recognition. Only a universal world-power like the papacy could create
schools of universal knowledge, and lend to their degrees a universal
value. I hasten to bring out some less familiar views of the influences
of Catholicism as an educational force. There are many kinds of
education, and not all of it is gotten from books or under the shadow
of the pedagogue's severe visage.

It is true that the education given by the Catholic
Church was very largely for ecclesiastics. Still, there was a great
deal more of lay education than is usually admitted, especially in
France and Italy. From the renaissance of the Roman law in the twelfth
century, laymen had the most distinguished careers open to them, and as
time went on they practically monopolized the great wealth that always
follows the complication and intricacies of the law. However, the
churchmen used their education, on the whole, for the popular good.
Every cathedral in Europe was a seat of good government. There
traditions of justice and equity were administered with an eye to the
new needs of the times. There was learning with charity, affection for
the multitudes with inherited practice of self-sacrifice. Often the
only power to resist the excesses of feudalism and to insist on the
common rights of man was the bishop. In his immortal tale of the
"Promessi Sposi," Alessandro Manzoni has drawn with a master-hand the
portrait of a great bishop in conflict with a feudal master. That this
bishop was really Fed erigo Borromeo, a near relative of St. Charles
Borromeo, does not detract from the truth or interest of the portrayal.
Every monastery was a home of the peaceful arts,
domestic and agricultural. The great educational virtues of order,
economy, regularity, division of labor, foresight, and the like, were
taught in each together with other useful virtues, like patience,
humility, submission -- those elements of the poor man's philosophy
that are as useful to-day when a Tolstoi preaches them, as they were
when Christ gave the example that alone makes them practicable, and as
they will be when the hot fevers of our changing conditions have burned
out, and we settle down again to one of those long cycles of social
immobility that have their function in the vast round of human life, as
sleep has in the daily life of the individual. By its very nature, the
details of the popular education of the Middle Ages escape us. There
are no written annals for the poor and the lowly. Yet all over Europe
there went on daily a profitable education of the masses as to their
true origin and end, the nature value and uses of life, the nature and
sanctity of duty, calling, estate. Every church was a forum of
Christian politics, where the people were formed easily and regularly
by thousands of devoted parish priests, whose names are written in the
Book of Life, who walked this earth blamelessly, and who were the true schoolmasters of European mankind in the days of its
infancy and first helpless youth. Let any one read "Ekkehard," the
noble historical romance of Victor Scheffel, and the still nobler poem
of Weber, "Dreizehnlinden," and he will see, done by two hands of
genius, the process that is otherwise written in all the chronicles and
laws of Europe; in all its institutions, and the great facts of its
history as far as they affect the interests of the people. The
countless churches, chapels, oratories, were like so many open museums
and galleries, where the eye gained a sense of color and outline, the
mind a wider range of historical information, and the heart many a
consolation. They were the books of the people, fitted to their
aptitudes, located where they were needed, forever open to the reaper
in the field, the tired traveller on his way, the women and children of
the village or hamlet. They were so many silent pulpits, out of which
the loving Jesus looked down and taught men from His cross, from His,
tabernacle, the true education of equality, fraternity, patience -- all
healing virtues of His great heart.

From Otranto tp Drontheim, from the Hebrides and Greenland to the Black
Sea, there went on this effective preaching, this largest possible
education for real life. In it whole peoples were the
pupils, and the Catholic Church was the mistress. When it was done, out
of semi-savages she had made polite and industrious nations; out of
ignorant and brutal warriors she had made Christian knights and
soldiers; out of enemies of the fine arts and their rude destroyers she
had made a new world of most cunning artificers and craftsmen; out of
the scum and slime of humanity that the Roman beat down with his sword
and the Greek drew back from with horror, she had made gentlemen like
Bayard and ladies like Blanche of France and Isabel of Castile.

In the history of mankind this was never seen before, and will,
perhaps, never be seen again. How was the wonder accomplished that the
Slav, dreamy and mystical, should feel and act like the fierce and
violent Teuton; that the highly individual and romantic Keltic soul
should suffer the yoke of Roman order and discipline? How came it about
that all over Europe there was a common understanding as to the
principles of life, of mutual human relations, of the dealings of one
society with another? How could it be that the word of an aged man at
Rome should be borne with the swiftness of the wind to
every little church, to every castled crag, to every forgotten hamlet
and remote valley of the Alps or the Pyrenees, and be listened to with
reverence and submission? How was this absolute conquest, for conquest
it was, of the human heart accomplished? Very largely by the Liturgy of
the Catholic Church. It was a conquest of prayer, the public prayer of
the Catholic Church. This organized worship of God lies at the basis of
all European civilization, and it is the just boast of Catholicism,
that such as it is, it is her work. When we take up a Roman Missal, we
take up the book that more than any other transformed the world of
barbarism. In it lie the ordinary public worship of the Catholic
Church, the service of the Mass, the gospels broken up into short
paragraphs, the marrow of the life-wisdom of the Old Testament, the
deposit of world-experience that her great bishops and priests had
gained, profound but true comments of the Church herself, hymns of
astonishing beauty, tenderness, and rapture, prayers that are like
ladders of light from the heart of man to the feet of his Maker. It is
this public prayer that ensouled every church, from the wooden chapels
of Ireland or Norway to the high embossed roof of
Westminster or Cologne. This prayer first inflamed the heart of the
priest, and put into his mouth a tongue of irresistible conviction,
and, therefore, of unction and eloquence. After all, it was nothing but
the Scripture of the Old and the New Testament; but it was the
Scripture announced, spoken, sung, preached; the Scripture appealing to
the public heart with every art that man was capable of using to make
it triumph. There was never a more profound historical error than to
imagine that the Middle Ages were ignorant of the Scriptures. Let any
one who yet labors under the delusion read the epoch-making book of two
learned writers, Schwarz and Laib, on the Poor Man's Bible in the
Middle Ages.

So there grew up the concept of solidarity, of a Christian people bound
together by ties holier and deeper than race, or tongue, or
nationality, or human culture could create -- a sense of mutual
responsibility, a public conscience, and a public will. What is
known as public opinion is in reality a mediaeval product; for then
first the world saw all mankind, of Europe at least, possessed of
common views and conscious of their moral value and necessity.

In so far as public opinion is an educational force, it
is the result of those frequent appeals that the clergy of the Middle
Ages made to a higher law and a higher order of ideas than human
ingenuity or force could command -- it is the result of a thousand
conflicts like those about royal marriages and divorces that at once
rise to a supernatural level, of as many dead-locks like that between
Henry IV. of Germany and Gregory VII., where the independence, the very
existence, of the spiritual power was at stake. The only weapons of the
Church were moral ones, popular faith in her office and her rights,
universal popular respect for her tangible and visible services,
popular affection for her as the mystical Bride of Christ, a popular
conviction that she alone stood between armed rapacity and the
incipient liberties of the people.

XII.

There is a very subtle and remarkable educational influence of the
Catholic Church that is not often appreciated at its full value -- I
mean her share in the preservation and formation of the great modern
vernaculars, such as English, German, Irish, the Slavonic tongues.
Even languages like French, Italian, and Spanish, the
Romance tongues, formed from the everyday or rustic Latin of the
soldiers and the traders of Rome, her peasants and slaves, owe a great
deal to the affection and solicitude of the Church. In all these
tongues there was always a certain amount of instruction provided for
the people. The missionaries had to learn them, to explain the great
truths in them, and to deal day by day with the fierce German, the
turbulent Slav, the high-spirited Kelt. It has always been the policy
of the Catholic Church to respect the natural and traditional in every
people so far as they have not gotten utterly corrupted. From Caedmon
down, the earliest monuments of Anglo-Saxon literature are nearly all
ecclesiastical, and all of it has been saved by ecclesiastics. The
earliest extensive written monument of the German tongues is the famous
Heliand or paraphrase of the gospel, all imbued with the high warlike
spirit of the ancient Teutons. All that we have of the old Gothic
tongue, the basis of German philology, has come down to us through the
translation of the Bible by the good Bishop Ulfilas out of the Vulgate
into Gothic, or from the solicitude of St. Columbanus and his Irish
companions to convert the Arian Goths of Lombardy. These languages were once rude and coarse; they got a high content, the
thought of Greece and Rome, through the Catholic churchman. They took
on higher and newer grammatical forms in the same way. Spiritual ideas
entered them, and a whole world of images and linguistic helps came
from a knowledge of the Scriptures that were daily expounded in them.
Through the Old Testament the history of the world entered these
tongues as explained by Catholic priests. Their pagan coarseness and
vulgarity were toned down or utterly destroyed. St. Patrick and his
bishops and poets, we are told, examined the Brehon Law of the Irish
and blessed it, except what was against the gospel or the natural law.
Then he bade the poet Dubtach put a thread of verse about it, that is,
cast it into metrical form. The first Irish missionaries in Germany,
like St. Gall and St. Kilian, spoke to the people both in Latin and in
German, and it is believed that the first German dictionary was their
wqrk, for the needs of preaching and intercourse. Some shadow of the
majesty of Rome thus fell upon the modern tongues from the beginning,
sbme infusion of the subtleness and delicacy of the Greek mind fell to
their lot. The mental toil and victory and glory of a
thousand years were thus saved, at least in part. The Catholic Church
was the bridge over which these great and desirable goods came down in
a long night of confusion and disorder. The great epics of France and
Germany, the Chansons de Geste, were saved in the monasteries or with
the connivance of monks, to whom the wandering singers were very dear
in spite of their satire and free tongues. The "Chanson de Roland," the
"Lied of the Nibelungs," the "Lied of Gudrun," the great Sagas and Edda
of the Northland, owe their preservation and no little of their
content, color, and form, to the interest of monks and churchmen in the
saving of old stories, old fables, and old genealogies, especially
after the first period of national conversion had gone by. We have yet
in Irish a lovely tale, the "Colloquy of Ossian with St. Patrick," in
which the average sympathy of the Old Irish cleric for the relics of
the past and his just sense of their spirit and meaning are brought out
very vividly and picturesquely.

It is in the Romance languages that the noble institution of chivalry
that L‚on Gautier has so perfectly described found its best expression;
that the roots of all modern poetry that will live are
now known to lie; that the introspective and meditative phases of the
literary spirit first showed themselves on a large scale; that the
intensely personal note of Christianity comes out quite free and
natural, unattended by that distracting perfection of form that the
classic Latin and Greek could not help offering; that purely personal
virtues like courage, honor, loyalty in man, fidelity, tenderness,
gentleness, moral beauty in woman, are brought out as the highest
natural goods of life, in contradiction to the Greek and Roman who
looked on the great political virtues and the commonwealth, the State
itself, as the only fit ideals of humanity. Thereby, to say the least,
they excluded the weaker sex from its due share in all life and from
public recognition of those excellencies by which alone it could hope
to shine and excel. One day the labor of ages blossomed in a perfect
and centennial flower, the "Divina Commedia" of Dante, that has ten
thousand roots in the daily life, the common doctrine and discipline of
the Catholic Church, and remains forever an unapproachable document of
the medheval genius, indeed, but also the immortal proof of how
thoroughly the Catholic Church had educated the popular mind and heart
in all that was good, true, and worthy of imitation, in antiquity as
well as in the history that then as now men were making from day to
day. He was conscious himself that heaven and earth had built up the
poem in his great heart. Perhaps he was also conscious that God was
making of him another Homer, another Vergil, out of whose glorious
lines all future ages should, even despite themselves, drink a divine
ichor -- the spirit of Jesus Christ as exemplified in Catholicism.

XIII.

Under the aegis of this extraordinary power of the Church, there grew
up a common mental culture,based on religion and penetrated with
its spirit. There was one language of scholarship and refinement -- the
Latin -- that often rose to a height not unworthy of its original
splendor. Something common and universal marked all the arts, and the
workman of Italy or Germany might exercise his craft with ease and
profit in England or Spain. Within the Catholic fold the freedom of
association was unlimited, not only for religious purposes, but for all
economic and artistic ones as well. Human energy essayed
every channel of endeavor, and in some, notably in architecture, has
never soared so high in the centuries that followed.

One result of this solidarity of thought and purpose was the creation
of what we call the Western mind and spirit, a complex ideal
view of life that differs from the past views of Greek and Roman, as it
is in many respects opposed to the life-philosophy of the Eastern
world. Human liberty and equality, hopefulness in progress, a spirit of
advance, of self-reliance --an optimism, in other words -- are among
its connoting marks. All this is older and deeper than anything of the
last three or four centuries. It was in the Catholic Italian Columbus,
venturing out upon the unknown ocean, and his Portuguese predecessors,
in the Conquistadori, in the endless attempts to penetrate China and
the East from Marco Polo and the Franciscan missionaries down, in the
Crusaders, in the long and successful resistance of Hungary, Poland,
and Austria to the advance of Islam. Here, indeed, the Western world
owes a debt of gratitude to those who arrested the teachings and the
spirit of the camel-driver of Mecca. No one saw better than the bishops
of Rome that the world might not stand still; that the eternal
antithesis of the East and West was on again; that the
fierce impact of Islam breaking against the walls of Constantinople was
nothing in comparison with its boglike encroachments at every point of
contact with Europe. It is a pathetic tale -- their tears, implorings,
and objurgations. Something they accomplished. But if the Oriental
problem is still quivering with life; if Western civilization, that is
in all essentials Catholic civilization, has to go again at the mighty
task -- but this time from the setting sun instead of from Jerusalem
and St. Jean d'Acre -- it is because one day, shortly after the fall of
Constantinople in 1452, the powers of Europe left the Bishop of Rome at
Ancona call on them in vain to go out with the little pontifical fleet
and retake from the unspeakable Turk the city of Constantinople. Pius
II., not the kings of Europe, was the real statesman, as every
succeeding decade shows. However, the popes estopped the fatalism and
dry rot of Islam from the possession of the Danube; they loaned
indirectly to the Grand Dukes of Muscovy the strength out of which they
one day. carved the office of Czar; their influence was felt in all the
Balkan peninsula; their city was the one spot where an intelligent and
disinterested observation of events by the Golden Horn
went on. Better, after all, a thousand times, a Europe torn by domestic
religious dissension, than a Europe, perhaps an America, caught in the
deadly anaconda-folds of Islam, that never yet failed to smother all
mental and civil progress, and has thereby declared itself the most
immoral of all religious forces known to history!

XIV.

Other phases there are of Catholicism as a plastic formative power in
the life of the peoples of Europe, as the creator of their distinctive
institutions; they may come up for brief notice at another time. Thus,
the institution of chivalry, with its mystic idealization of woman; the
ever-increasing authority and influence of woman herself; the honor of
saintly character, essentially, like woman, unwarlike; the function of
the pilgrim, the monk, the papal envoy, as disseminators of general
views and principles; the publication of great papal documents, with
their lengthy arguments; the multitude of friars drawing their office
and authority from a central source and upholding. its prestige at
every village cross; the history of the Church as related from ten
thousand pulpits; the genuine influence of the great
festivals, general and local; the public penances; the frequent
striking renunciation of high office and worldly comforts; the frequent
reformation of manners; the increasing use of objects of piety, of the
fine arts, as a spur or a lever for devotion -- all these and other
agencies were everywhere and at once at work, and helped to give the
mediaeval life that intense charm of motion, color, and variety that
every student of history must always find in it.

* "Rugged and unlovely, indeed, was all that the outward aspect of
religion at first presented to the world; it was the contrast presented
by the dim and dreary Catacombs underground to the pure and brilliant
Italian sky and the monuments of Roman wealth and magnificence above.
But in that poor and mean society, which cared so little for the things
of sense and sight, there were nourished and growing up -- for, indeed,
it was the Church of the God of all glory and all beauty, the chosen
home of the Eternal creating Spirit -- thoughts of a perfect beauty
above this world; of a light and a glory which the sun could never see;
of types, in character and in form, of grace, of sweetness, of
nobleness, of tenderness, of perfection, which could find no home in
time -- which were the eternal and the unseen on which human life
bordered, and which was to it, indeed, 'no foreign land.' There these
Romans unlearned their old hardness and gained a new language and new
faculties. Hardly and with difficulty, and with scanty success, did
they at first strive to express what glowed with such magnificence to
their inward eye, and kindled their souls within them. Their efforts
were rude -- rude in art, often hardly less rude in language. But that
divine and manifold idea before them, they knew that it was a reality;
it should not escape them, though it still baffled them -- they would
not let it go. And so, step by step, age after age, as it continued to
haunt their minds, it gradually grew into greater distinctness and
expression. From thb rough attempts in the catacombs or the later
mosaics, in all their roughness so instinct with the majesty and
tenderness and severe sweetness of the thoughts which inspired them --
from the emblems and types and figures, the trees and rivers of
Paradise, the dove of peace, the palms of triumph, the Good Shepherd,
the heart no longer 'desiring,' but at last tasting 'the
waterbrooks,' from the faint and hesitating adumbrations of the most
awful of human countenances -- from all these feeble but earnest
attempts to body forth what the soul was full of, Christian art passed,
with persistent undismayed advance, through the struggles of the Middle
Ages to the inexpressible delicacy and beauty of Giotto and Fra
Angelico, to the Last supper of Leonardo, to the highest that the human
mind ever imagined of tenderness and unearthly majesty, in the Mother
and the Divine Son of the Madonna di San Sisto." -- Dean Church in
"Gifts of Civilization" (1892), pp. 208-9.